They say "people will work less" like it's a bad thing.

Isn't that the whole idea of UBI? To make up for lost work due to technological advances...

The transfer caused total individual income excluding the transfers to fall by about $1,800/year relative to the control group and a 3.9 percentage point decrease in labor market participation. Participants reduced their work hours as a result of the transfers by 1-2 hours/week and participants’ partners reduced their work hours by a comparable amount.

Just in case anyone was wondering here is how much less work people did in the study. So ~4hrs/week less working on average for couples or 1-2hrs/week per person.

Of course productivity has increased 87.3% since 1979 so those lost hours mean nothing in the grand scheme of things.

Good...?

A frequent argument against UBI is that recipients will decide to work less. This in turn will make labour (and consequently labour-intensive products) more expensive.

Oh boy, the stupid people found a way to defend being abused. It's good that people are working less. It shouldn't even make things more expensive. Now instead of 1 worker slaving away for 8 hours, we can have 2 workers slaving away for 4 hours each. It's nothing but beneficial for everyone who isn't profiting off of abuse.

How much misinformation was spread by the opposition?

The voters in Hamburg did not vote against universal basic income. They voted against a pilot project as a study which would have given around 2000 citizens about 1300€ for three years.

Not only have there already been studies like that, they're also not very meaningful given that those people know that this income was for a limited time frame and act accordingly.

This sounds absurd. Wtf is $750 going to get you that you no longer need to work much?

People having to work less is the whole point. UBI is not about increasing economic productivity. It's about distributing the fruits of the productivity more equitably.

There’s a push for companies to constantly increase their profits. That means sooner or later prices must rise. Sooner or later labor must be paid less. In fact, this has been happening for decades. Prices have been rising faster than wages for decades.

Seems to me like labor should get paid more and there should be something (regulations?) to prevent prices from rising when it happens.

Economics is a religion, not a science.

How economics became a religion | John Rapley https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/jul/11/how-economics-became-a-religion

UBI fundamentally doesn't work unless you have controls in place against inflation (read: profiteering). Give everyone an additional paycheck? Welp, I guess prices of everything just rose to compensate this sudden new "cash".

If I had a decent ubi, I'd go back to school full time, now that I'm getting the hang of it (doing college part time). So, of course I'd work less. This seems such a narrow scope of a ubi's impact

This is probably as good a place as any to ask a question I've been mulling around recently. One of my dad's friends told him that when they were on an Indian reservation, the casinos gave a stipend to everyone on the reservation and because they had this stipend, a lot of the people on the reservation decided to work less and instead just get drunk or do drugs or beat their wives or whatever.

My thought on this is that there are so many problems caused by poverty that it's possible that without the stipend from the casino, these folks would be even worse off. And there may not be good jobs in their area. And my dad said, well why don't they drive to somewhere that has jobs? Like that is something anybody would want to do if they didn't need to get the money.

So I guess my question is, are there any people who've done research on stipends like this that already exists in the real world and any data specifically on Indian reservations would be really interesting to me?

Why are they using a pic of £1 coins and UK notes?

My biggest concern with UBI is price increases across every metric to account for it, like what happened when women entered the workforce. It used to be that a family could survive on a single paycheck but after decades the corporations and resources realized they could charge almost double and still get it. I worry it would be the same with UBI.

My heart goes up to you, residents of Hamburg…